How To SEO Your Food Blog Without Losing Your Soul

A common misconception of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is that it's a black art of writing for robots. This might be true of some SEO, but there is bad SEO and good SEO. Bad SEO is all about serving the search engine robot overlords by any means necessary in order to rank highly in Google. But good SEO keeps the true goal in mind: reaching an audience of human beings who are searching for exactly what you are writing about. Here are two simple tips for optimizing your food blog without sacrificing any of your individual style.

The first tip to SEO is to write quality content. Write for humans. Write from the heart. Be yourself. If you're on topic, you'll mention keywords naturally. So don't bother counting keywords or worse, sacrifice the quality of your writing by stuffing your blog post with them unnaturally. Search engines are in the business of giving people what they want. Thus, any search engine algorithms that promote content written for robots over content written for humans are bound to fail. Quality content is still king. Writing great content will make people want to link to you, which is the most essential element of SEO.

The second tip is to craft your titles very carefully. The title you give to your blog post shows up in many places that both the search engine robots and human readers pay much attention to. (Click on the thumbnails below to see a slideshow with examples.) Most blogging platforms automatically put the title on the main page as a permalink to the post, in the title bar on the blog post page, and in the address bar. But the title also shows up in the search results, on Facebook if someone shares it, in Twitter if someone tweets it, and in RSS readers. It not only affects how search engines index your content, but it plays a major role in whether human readers will click or share your blog post. So if there's one place where you should think about putting keywords, it is in the title. There's someone out there who wants to read exactly what you're writing. Think about what they might type into a search engine to find your blog post and put those words in the title. The more specific you are, the more likely you are to show up prominently in search. But more importantly, readers will be more likely to click on your posts in twitter, facebook, and RSS readers if they know what your posts are about.

What are your thoughts on SEO for food blogs?